Three things led me to my pitch for my final Film 3 project. Firstly, the thing that sparked my interest and led me into digging up the next two, was this:

My time in the Film 3 course has led to a constant awareness of whats going on around me and how it could be used in a project. I now think ‘how would I shoot this location?’, ‘how would I light it?’, ‘what kind of movie would I shoot here?’, whenever I encounter a new or interesting location. So when I was at my boyfriends and he tossed an apple to his dog, who began crunching at it with what I can only describe as horrifyingly visceral enthusiasm, I dived for my phone.

Sound has been a forgotten part of my projects until recently. Besides adding background music my sound has been simply what was already in the video, until my last project when I manipulated the sound, adding whooshes, speeding it up and overlapping it. This has opened up my mind to what can be done with sound and I determined that I would like to explore sound, particularly sound effects, in my final project.

I want to use the above sound as a basis for my project, but also use the layering of sounds to create a clearer image of exactly what is going on. If you didn’t know the context for the above clip, it does sound quite horrifying, but it lacks the meatier sounds that would make it seem like an animal tearing into a body, rather than a fruit. This leads me to the second inspiration for my project, which was a Mythbusters episode I watched years ago and which sprang to mind when I began thinking on this project. In the episode Jamie and Adam investigate whether Hollywood punches sound like real ones, and when they discovered that they do not, how Hollywood punches are created.

Several things go into the typical punch sound you will hear in movies. The swish of a dowel rod to give it the illusion of speed, a normal punch as well as a thump to the lower chest to give it a deeper resonance, and the sound of walnuts to simulate a skull cracking.

This has gotten me thinking on how I would create a layered sound from different objects. Would chicken breasts or steaks make a better meatier sound? How would you create the sound of claws ripping through different materials? All these examples are very macabre, but my focus is on my imagined project, the sound of a monster outside a young womans window, while she is frozen in fear. This gives me the chance to focus mainly on audio, while allowing me to also dabble in night time shooting, which is another area of interest for me.

My interest in this particular area is particularly avid because of my interest in action movies, and how fight scenes are created. During the course of my project I may create a diverse range of sounds in order to build a database which can be used for multiple projects, especially fight scenes I may want to create later. The importance of sound effects was really cemented in me when I watched ‘Nightwing: The Series’, a fan-made youtube production that was recommended to me. The first episode contains a brilliantly choreographed fight scene, but the whole time I was watching it there was a niggling sensation that something was missing. At the end of it it came to me that the sound effects, in some cases, were either missing or not in tune, or even just not what I expected, which messed with my suspension of disbelief.

Sound is such an important component of any film production, and it is one that I have been neglecting, but I aim to rectify this with the production of my final Film 3 project.